Taavet Hinrikus

Large incumbents become big and sometimes become lazy and set themselves up for failure in the future.

You start a business being hungry, foolish, and a little bit naive. But more often than not, you end up being disrupted yourself. It happened to Skype.

People bought bitcoin because they thought it would be worth more tomorrow. And a lot of people got lucky. But we're not seeing real people use bitcoin. And we don't know what problem it solves. Now, blockchain, I think, is a genius advancement in technology.

Bitcoin, I think we can say, is dead.

We built TransferWise focused on customer innovation. That means we build our product based first and foremost on our customers.

When we talk about technology changing the world, we often hear about how it makes our lives easier, more connected, safer, or even healthier. They're all things we can easily identify with. The Internet makes our lives easier; services like Skype and WhatsApp allows us to be more connected - the examples are endless.